Related papers: Markov decision processes with observation costs: …
In this paper we show existence and uniqueness of a solution for a system of m variational partial differential inequalities with inter-connected obstacles. This system is the deterministic version of the Verification Theorem of the…
For hidden Markov models one of the most popular estimates of the hidden chain is the Viterbi path -- the path maximising the posterior probability. We consider a more general setting, called the pairwise Markov model, where the joint…
This note summarizes the optimization formulations used in the study of Markov decision processes. We consider both the discounted and undiscounted processes under the standard and the entropy-regularized settings. For each setting, we…
Decision-theoretic planning with risk-sensitive planning objectives is important for building autonomous agents or decision-support systems for real-world applications. However, this line of research has been largely ignored in the…
We consider the problem of computing the value and an optimal strategy for minimizing the expected termination time in one-counter Markov decision processes. Since the value may be irrational and an optimal strategy may be rather…
This paper considers the problem of finding strategies that satisfy a mixture of sure and threshold objectives in Markov decision processes. We focus on a single $\omega$-regular objective expressed as parity that must be surely met while…
This paper studies a large number of homogeneous Markov decision processes where the transition probabilities and costs are coupled in the empirical distribution of states (also called mean-field). The state of each process is not known to…
We consider an auto-scaling technique in a cloud system where virtual machines hosted on a physical node are turned on and off depending on the queue's occupation (or thresholds), in order to minimise a global cost integrating both energy…
In several applications such as databases, planning, and sensor networks, parameters such as selectivity, load, or sensed values are known only with some associated uncertainty. The performance of such a system (as captured by some…
Safety in reinforcement learning has become increasingly important in recent years. Yet, existing solutions either fail to strictly avoid choosing unsafe actions, which may lead to catastrophic results in safety-critical systems, or fail to…
In this work, we study the problem of actively classifying the attributes of dynamical systems characterized as a finite set of Markov decision process (MDP) models. We are interested in finding strategies that actively interact with the…
A new model for controlled sensing for multihypothesis testing is proposed and studied in the sequential setting. This new model, termed {\em controlled Markovian observation} model, exhibits a more complicated memory structure in the…
This paper studies the expected value of multiplicative rewards, where rewards obtained in each step are multiplied (instead of the usual addition), in Markov chains (MCs) and Markov decision processes (MDPs). One of the key differences to…
We consider penalized estimation in hidden Markov models (HMMs) with multivariate Normal observations. In the moderate-to-large dimensional setting, estimation for HMMs remains challenging in practice, due to several concerns arising from…
We consider a Markov control model in discrete time with countable both state space and action space. Using the value function of a suitable long-run average reward problem, we study various reachability/controllability problems. First, we…
Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) are promising methods for solving combinatorial optimization problems on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. However, benchmarking VQAs is difficult due to their stochastic behavior and the…
In this paper, we study the Markovian Pandora's Box Problem, where decisions are governed by both order constraints and Markovianly correlated rewards, structured within a shared directed acyclic graph. To the best of our knowledge,…
A decisionmaker faces $n$ alternatives, each of which represents a potential reward. After investing costly resources into investigating the alternatives, the decisionmaker may select one, or more generally a feasible subset, and obtain the…
We develop a framework for convexifying a fairly general class of optimization problems. Under additional assumptions, we analyze the suboptimality of the solution to the convexified problem relative to the original nonconvex problem and…
We study optimal control problems in infinite horizon when the dynamics belong to a specific class of piecewise deterministic Markov processes constrained to star-shaped networks (inspired by traffic models). We adapt the results in [H. M.…